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IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard has said that Greece needs to slash pension spending by 1% of GDP in order to reach its new budget targets. The Greek government continues to resist, arguing that Greeks dependent on pensions have already suffered enough. But it has yet to put a compelling alternative to its creditors. Read more »

One effect of the financial crisis was to change how the Fed conducts monetary policy. This could be long-lasting and important.

Prior to the crisis, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) set a target for the so-called federal funds rate, the interest rate at which depository institutions lend balances to each other overnight. The New York Fed would then conduct open market operations – buying and selling securities – in order to nudge that rate towards the target. It did this by affecting the supply of banks’ reserve balances at the Fed, which go up when they sell securities to the Fed and down when they buy them. Read more »

As our recent CFR interactive shows, central bank currency swaps have spread like wildfire since the financial crisis. In 2006, the Fed had only two open swap lines outstanding, with Canada and Mexico, for just $2 billion and $3 billion, respectively. At its high point in 2008, the Fed had fourteen open swap lines, with as much as $583 billion drawn. Read more »

On April 15, China’s finance ministry revealed the 57 “prospective founding members” of the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, of which China is the architect. The likely founders include many U.S. allies, such as the UK, Australia, and South Korea, which the Obama Administration had lobbied not to join, seeing the AIIB as a Chinese alternative to the U.S.-architected World Bank. Read more »

In his recent book, Market Madness: A Century of Oil Panics, Crises, and Crashes, our colleague Blake Clayton explains the role of market psychology in contributing to the wild price swings that have characterized the oil market over the past hundred years. Using data from Google Books NGrams, he shows that whenever oil prices climb for an extended period comments about “running out of oil” and “running out of gasoline” proliferate. These beliefs have repeatedly proven unfounded. Read more »

The “law of one price” holds that identical goods should trade for the same price in an efficient market. To what extent does it hold internationally?

The Economist magazine’s famous Big Mac Index uses the price of McDonald’s burgers around the world, expressed in a common currency (U.S. dollars), to estimate the extent to which various currencies are over- or under-valued. The Big Mac is a global product, identical across borders, which makes it an interesting one for this purpose. Yet it travels badly—cross-border flows of burgers won’t align their prices internationally. Read more »

In its last two statements, the FOMC has said that it “expects inflation to rise gradually toward 2 percent over the medium term”—2 percent being its target rate. What would it take to move it there?

We looked at how many different variables correlate with the Fed’s preferred inflation measure—core PCE inflation. Oil and the dollar have been much in the news of late, but their prices have had little relationship with core PCE inflation over the past decade, as shown in the bottom-left figures above. The single variable that seems to correlate best, as seen in the top-left figure, is the employment/population ratio among adults aged 25-54 years. If we follow this ratio’s trend-line since 2013, when it began its last major upturn, this suggests that core PCE inflation won’t hit 2% until late 2016 or early 2017—as seen in the large right-hand figure. If we follow it since its trough in 2011, core PCE inflation does not hit 2% until late 2017. Read more »

For many Emerging Markets, May 22, 2013 is a day that will live in infamy. It marks the start of the great Taper Tantrum, when Ben Bernanke’s carefully hedged remarks on prospects for slowing Fed asset purchases triggered a massive sell-off in EM bond and currency markets. Read more »